renzora
Game Engine

Terminal

The Terminal panel is a real, interactive command line living inside the editor. It's not a log view that echoes a few commands — it's a genuine shell (PowerShell on Windows, your $SHELL elsewhere) running through an operating- system pseudo-terminal. That means full-screen, interactive programs work exactly as they do in a standalone terminal: you can run claude, vim, htop, git, a dev server — anything.

Terminal vs. Console. The Console panel shows the engine's own log messages (info / warnings / errors, with filters and a slash-command box). The Terminal panel is a separate thing: an actual shell for running programs.

Opening it

The Terminal is a distribution plugin, so it shows up like any other panel:

  1. Click the + (Add Panel) button on a dock and pick Terminal (under the Tools category), or drag the Terminal tab into any dock split.
  2. The shell starts the first time the panel becomes visible.

If you don't see it in the picker, the renzora_terminal plugin isn't present — it ships as a removable dylib in plugins/. Delete that file and the editor has no terminal at all.

Using it

  • Click the terminal to give it keyboard focus (a block cursor appears). While it's focused, your keystrokes go to the shell — editor shortcuts like G/S/Delete and camera movement are suppressed so typing isn't hijacked.
  • Click elsewhere (or switch tabs) to release focus and get your editor shortcuts back.
  • Everything you'd expect works: Enter, Backspace, Tab completion, arrow-key history, Ctrl-C to interrupt, Ctrl-D to send EOF, and the full arrow/Home/End/PageUp/PageDown set for TUIs.
  • Resizing the panel resizes the shell — programs re-flow to the new width and height automatically.
  • Scroll with the mouse wheel to look back through output history; typing jumps you back to the live bottom.
  • Select text by clicking and dragging. Copy it with Ctrl+Shift+C and paste with Ctrl+Shift+V (the Shift keeps plain Ctrl+C free to send an interrupt to the running program).

Running Claude

Because it's a true terminal, you can launch interactive assistants right in the editor:

claude

The full-screen interface renders inside the panel, colors and all.

Choosing a different shell

By default the Terminal launches PowerShell on Windows and your login shell ($SHELL, falling back to /bin/bash) on Linux and macOS. To override it, set the RENZORA_TERMINAL_SHELL environment variable before launching the editor — for example RENZORA_TERMINAL_SHELL=cmd.exe or RENZORA_TERMINAL_SHELL=zsh.

The shell starts in the editor's current working directory.

Good to know

  • The shell is killed when the panel is destroyed (and hangs up when the editor exits).
  • Output keeps flowing while the tab is hidden, so a long-running command — or a backgrounded claude session — is still there when you switch back to it.
  • The terminal is not available in the exported game; it's an editor-only panel.